Staff Photo by Allison Kwesell 630 Junior High School kids dance to the Hokey Pokey during The Edge, a week-long Christian Camp at Covenant College. The group is trying to set a world-record and be acknowledged in the Guiness Book of World Records.

It was the longest snake of wiggling and giggling middle school students the world had every seen.

Boys and girls with gleaming braces and bright T-shirts squeezed their hands on the shoulders of the teens in front of them. It was difficult for the group to take the "massage" seriously, but even as they laughed and joked they were careful not to break ranks.

"Ouch! You're hurting me" echoed across the Covenant College lawn atop Lookout Mountain.

Every night this week, leaders of the Edge Conference, a Christian camp for young teens meeting at Covenant, corralled more than 842 people, 600 of whom are middle-school campers, to attempt to break a list of Guinness World Records.

On one night, the group of teens, who came from all across the country, beat the record for the world's largest group massage, with 610 participants, organizers said.

They said the teens will attempt to make the record book for the world's largest game of Duck, Duck, Goose, the world's largest three-legged race and the world's largest air guitar ensemble before leaving camp next week.

"It's awesome, because I have always wanted to break a world record," said Caroline Thomas, a wide-eyed 13-year-old from Greensboro, N.C. "We are trying to break a record every day."

Kevin McQuillen, a youth pastor from Marietta, Ga., who's helping to run the camp, said the theme of this year's conference was being a hero for Christ, and it seemed appropriate to aim for a Guinness record.

"To do something heroic, we thought we would try to do something amazing and break as many world records as we can," he said.

While getting 600 middle school students to do anything together is a serious challenge, organizers said they've had fun working with the teens.

"We talked about trying to have the most people doing (Michael Jackson's) 'Thriller,'" said Greg Marshall, a youth pastor from Lexington, S.C. "But you had to do the whole dance, and we didn't think we could teach it."

Mr. Marshall said he has been asked several times by campers if their names were going to be included in the record book. Sadly, he said, only the Edge Conference would be listed.